May 10th

Friends, it has been too long. I’ve been looking forward to kicking back, pouring a hot beverage and sharing a leisurely Sunday afternoon with you over another This Week in Videogame Blogging!

Sensual Design

Let’s start with a few pieces on how game design creates meaning through the senses. In part 3 of his ongoing series on lighting, Robert Yang discusses the particularities of lighting 3D games. The three-point lighting system often found in film and 2D games is a great standard most of the time, but, according to Yang, it can’t be the standard in 3D spaces:

[developers] think their goal is to achieve great screenshots, and in film / photography / theater / 2D games that is an admirable goal. But as people working in 3D games, our actual goal is to craft some sort of navigable 3D space, experience, or system, and our lighting needs to be part of that context.

By the time I was done, I knew the city and its many intricacies. I had exhausted every possible conversation option with all of the people that live there. I wandered around for hours solving puzzles without knowing how they would add to the main story. I was a resident like any other (although it’s possible I was the only one with a purpose). Suffice to say, I lived there.

Switching from sight to sound, our own Zolani Stewart hosts this week’s episode of Critical Switch and plays some of the background noises in Mirror’s Edge to illustrate how its sound effects ground the game’s setting and the avatar’s body.

Finally, Heather Alexandra closes the topic for now in an article in Paste magazine. Alexandra argues that “Videogames Have a Pessimism Problem” that can only be solved by restoring a lost sense of heroism. Her diagnosis of the kinds of games published in the last decade doesn’t pull any punches:

Created works always reflect the times they are made in and we all contribute to the tone of our time. The American zeitgeist is dominated by hopelessness. How could it not be? Debt cripples our students, the people meant to protect and serve citizens are little more than militarized thugs and our politicians vote to restrict the rights of the marginalized. This hopelessness isn’t unique to America; there are problems everywhere. It’s global.

Strangethink’s games have many aesthetic and conceptual calling cards. They’re all pink and blue and made in Unity. They’re all on some level preoccupied with player exploration of space, with designed, virtual space as architecture, and with architecture as guiding not just naked interaction but also the internal work of interpretation. They tend toward a tension between “magic”, the metaphysical and affective, and to the science of construction, the math of procedural generation.

The “true ending” only unlocks after you’ve seen the other endings, as if you, the player, needed to get your selfish romancing desires out of the way before you could start to care about the characters on a deeper level.

For a person labouring under intense stress and lacking free time, Dreeps offered a window to another world. I plucked away at my keyboard all day, and every hour or so I would check on how Ishida (my little android – you get to name it) was doing. It was walking down the long road, encountering hardships that I very much sympathised with. Sometimes Ishida needed to be picked up. Often I felt I needed picking up too.

Perhaps because there is a strong note of aspiration. I didn’t make my Lady Boss to “reflect” me; I made her of something I wish I could be, and which was just close enough so that I could believe it wasn’t that far off.

Jillian from FemHype describes how games have influenced the perspectives on her body (content warning: discussion of eating disorders). Although games were there when she was too overwhelmed to socialize any other way, they kept their body standards:

In Second Life, the smaller and slimmer my avatar was, the more attention I’d receive. People (in this case, their avatars) would actually initiate verbal contact with the character I created—and it wasn’t to shame me! I was being acknowledged as a human being, which is kind of hilariously pitiful, since my assembled collection of pixels wasn’t human at all. At my lowest, I remember wishing that I, too, could be computer generated like the person-shaped avatar with decisions made by keystrokes.

Stephen Beirne describes ascending an exceptionally long ladder in Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater to a disembodied singer as a moment of game-breaking clarity, one with analogues in a pair of Sherlock Holmes-themed games.

… Snake Eater’s ladder is wonderful in being perhaps the most subtle act of media-bending in any Metal Gear Solid, but which acts its magic through channels which are perfectly ordinary in nature. We see the past, the future, we become absorbed in the moment at the same time as we sail high up above in adoration of its dramatic structure.

We are both an actor going through a set of motions and audience watching the story play out before us. If you think about it, this is really true of any adventure game. Except instead of being incidental, here it is the central design focus.

Dispatches from Vienna

Courtesy of our German Correspondent Joe Köller, let’s take a look at what’s been happening in the German-language games blogosphere.

The A Maze Independent Games Festival took place in Berlin recently, and audio recordings of all talks are available online. Reporting on the triple A meetup that preceded it, Lisa Ludwing concludes that the German games industry isn’t all that exciting.

Once again, I thank you all for inviting us into your home and sharing another week of videogame blogging with us. If you’re looking for more, though, don’t be discouraged, because our Lindsey Joyce has compiled a whole month’s worth of critical Let’s Plays for your viewing enjoyment.

We’ve been a busy bunch here at Critical Distance, but that’s the way we like it. So if there’s a great piece of games criticism you come across that you’d like to see us feature please get in touch with us on Twitter using the appropriate hashtag or through email.

Lastly, Critical Distance remains a community funded project and if you enjoy the projects we’re a part of please take a look at our Patreon page and consider contributing a small monthly donation. We’d really appreciate it!